For nearly 70 years, UNRWA has been the lifeline to the more than five million registered Palestinian refugees in the occupied territories and in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.

If the agency is not in a position to provide “vital services” and emergency support it will create a “very very serious problem,” he told reporters.

“In my opinion, and an opinion that is shared by most international observers, including some Israeli ones, it [UNRWA] is an important factor of stability.”

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Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said the US seemed to be following the Israeli government’s “instructions to gradually dismantle the one agency that was established by the international community to protect the rights of the Palestinian refugees and provide them with essential services.

She said in a statement that Trump’s administration was “targeting the most vulnerable segment of the Palestinian people and depriving the refugees of the right to education, health, shelter and a dignified life”, warning that the US was “creating conditions that will generate further instability throughout the region”.

Al Jazeera’s Bays said there was also “a political dimension” to the US move.

“Trump has said he is going to try and come up with the ‘deal of the century’ between Israelis and Palestinians – and yet he has now recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and cut the funding to UNRWA,” said Bays.

“It’s clear he wants to come up with a two with the two sides, yet one of the sides feels very strongly now that he is not an honest broker.”

‘There will be a revolution’

Trump’s threat had cast doubt on the fate of millions of Palestinian refugees, with many expressing fear about the impact of such a move.

“If the wakala [UNRWA] goes away, there will be no education, no healthcare, no sanitation,” Yazan Muhammad Sabri, an 18-year-old Palestinian refugee in Dheisheh campcamp told Al Jazeera last week.

“There won’t be anything – everything will disappear.”

Salah Ajarmeh, a 44-year-old refugee living in Aida camp had said that “if the services stop, there will be a revolution”.

“Palestinian uprisings began in the refugee camps in Jordan and Syria, and this will happen again.”

Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, also urged the US government to reverse its decision.

“The move will have devastating consequences for vulnerable Palestinian refugees across the Middle East, including hundreds of thousands of refugee children in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria who depend on the agency for their education,” he said in a statement.

“It will also deny their parents a social safety net that helps them to survive, and undermine the UN agency’s ability to respond in the event of another flare up in the conflict.”